Linux User Group Movie

Sorry, but I have had to remove this link. Hopefully it is just temporary. After an inquiry to lindenlabs, I became aware that indeed any posting of any conversation that occurs in secondlife must have consent first. I failed to do that and will attempt to get that consent. If I can, I will repost the link, if not, I will edit the movie and remove the portions showing chat. Thanks and my apologies for my errors.

Also, anyone linking to this video, please kindly remove the link from whatever site/blog/forum you may have posted it in until I can either get consent from all 10 persons whose various bits of chat showed in the video, or until I make a new video sans all chat. That way you avoid running afoul of SecondLife's policies as well. Thank you and again my apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. It's been a definite learning experience for me. I intend to correct it as best I can now.

If you possess a copy of this video, please delete it since it does violate the SecondLife Community Standards as per feedback I received from lindenlabs.

Edit: I have removed the video file from the servers I had it posted to. It is no longer available for download.

Looks great.. I guess you got everyone's consent to be in the video?

Nice work on the hacked video capture by the way.

Most impressive - I hope you will keep working on capturing video in Linux, maybe even cook up a quick HOWTO

Thanks for the reply. Is that really necessary to get everyone's consent? The video was meant to highlight using open source tools in linux to make this movie.

I guess if everyone's consent is necessary, then I will have to remove the link and the video. Any other viewpoints about this?

I have emailed linden labs since you brought this up. I don't want to violate any terms of service. It was just a fun video and a first effort. An attempt to make one using only open source applications. There was nothing in the video that revealed anything personally about any of the users, and nothing showing anyone in a negative way from my viewpoint. I did consider that some chat was showing in some parts of the video which could be a concern for some (so this did give me some hesitation in releasing it as such). But I hope the chat will be seen as incidental, not the emphasis of the movie. So dunno.

But if this is problematic, I will gladly remove the video and the link. Thanks.

Thanks ninjafoo NG.

What would you like in a HOWTO? I wrote a little script for using xwd, I'll post it here if you wish to try it out:

#!/bin/bash
echo "What is the window ID?"
read win_id
echo "How many snapshots to take?"
read snaps
echo "Filename prefix?"
read prefix
echo "Directory to save files in?"
read my_dir
sleep 3
for i in `seq 1 $snaps`;
do xwd -display :0.0 -id $win_id -nobdrs -out $my_dir/`printf "$prefix""_%6.6d.xwd" $i`;
sleep 0.2;
done

Get the hex value of your Second Life window ID from running xwininfo. The hex value is shown on the Window id line and takes the form of something like this:

0x1c00002 for example

It always starts with 0x

That little script attempts to take window dumps at a rate of 5 per second. Unfortunately my 1.8 Ghz comp only does maybe 2 or 3 per second at most, so if you have a better comp, your results may be better, or not. Oh, I have it sleep 3 seconds after you answer all questions, so you can move out of the way any windows in the way of the window you are trying to capture. Otherwise, those windows also get captured.

Be aware that the window dump files can be a megabyte or more depending on the size of the window you are capturing.

Or are you interested in a more general HOWTO? I started out using xwd and capturing around 240 frames at a time, which I can then process through gimp-gap to convert to video, or could convert to an animated gif too come to think of it. But I have recently connected my video out on my video card to my video in on my pvr-150 video capture card and that produces much better video framerates.

I tried using gvidcap, but since the secondlife client uses so much of the cpu, gvidcap has poor framerates, worse than my little hack, but again, ymmv.

Ofcourse, if anyone wants to improve this script, hey, it's linux, go for it!

Hope this helps.

I decided to give gvidcap a blast before resorting to anything scripty. It took quite a bit of tweaking the settings, but I have been able to capture video at a respectable 15fps with the Second Life client running at around 12fps (In the same area as I as was recording, the Second Life client normally runs at just over 40fps).

Set your Second Life client to run 800x600, crank up gvidcap and open the prefrences dialogue (r.click the box with a file name) and make your options something like the following:- Frames per Second : 15, Filename
: capture.mpeg, Max Frames : 0, Video Codec : MPEG4, Image Quality :100, Use shared Memory : Yes.

(Also posted on my blog - http://ninjafoo.blogspot.com/)

Any suggestions as to where video can be uploaded?

I don't think you need consents on this, really. It would be polite to announce it beforehand, though, in case some people do object. We can add a Floating Text over the LUG Penguin, for example, to announce that filming is being done.

Other than that, unless you get massive protests, I wouldn't worry too much. The area it was taken in IS open to all sides, and the event classifies as a public gathering.

yea, and the fact that this *is* just a computer game, right ?

* shudders *

ninjafoo Ng, I made an account with archive.org, but there are plent of other places, like youtube.com or putfile.com or you could even set up an account with video.google.com. Those are my suggestions, there's probably more out there too.

Oh, glad gvidcap worked for you, how do I get SL to have lower frame rates? gvidcap and SL brought my machine to a halt. But I have 1.8 Ghz and 512 M RAM, and 256 M vid card, but maybe I need more power, dunno.

Oh, and btw, nice blog ninjafoo NG.

Edit: Well I just tried gvidcap again here and again things just generally became extremely slow and the video captured by gvidcap was not good. So guess ymmv with gvidcap. Oh well, I had my hopes up too.

gvidcap does slaughter my performance - 40fps to 12fps is one hell of a drop. The trick seems to be not to bother trying to capture more fps than your left with after the overhead - there is a sweet spot. trying to capture 25fps leaves me with SL running at 3fps!

I dont see why gvidcap should be so much slower - isnt it doing the same as your script anyway?

Although to be honest, if Linden Labs seriously want people to use SL for making movies, there needs to be video recording built into the client.

There is movie recording built into the client - just not on Linux.

Ah... bugger